Peter Shor

23,004 reputation

3284

bio	website	math.mit.edu/~shor
	location	Cambridge, MA
	age	53
visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
	seen	14 mins ago
stats	profile views	2,030

I'm a professor in the Mathematics Dept. at M.I.T. I mostly work on quantum computation, quantum information, and quantum complexity, but I am also interested in other areas of theoretical computer science and mathematics.

	23,004 reputation	bio	website	math.mit.edu/~shor	visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
3284 badges		location	Cambridge, MA		seen	14 mins ago

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Dec 3	comment	Plurality of data The unambiguous grammatical mistake in the above sentences is using unambiguous as an adverb; it should be unambiguously.
Dec 2	revised	Mixing present and past tense in a report or public announcement added 596 characters in body
Dec 2	revised	Mixing present and past tense in a report or public announcement added 596 characters in body
Dec 2	answered	Mixing present and past tense in a report or public announcement
Dec 2	answered	Is it grammatically correct to say “have you got paper?”
Nov 30	comment	Capitalization of a noun that has be made definite It's used. By Harvard, in fact; on their website, they call themselves "the University". And I think this is quite common for cities, universities, and other institutions. For example, in New York City and its suburbs, "the City" has only one meaning, and my impression is that it's usually capitalized. (In London, "the City" is actually a proper name, since it doesn't mean London.)
Nov 30	comment	Difference between “random want” and “whim” +1. I think an additional difference between a random want and a whim is permanence. To me, it seems that a whim is a desire that you're quite likely not to have tomorrow, while a random want is something that you desire for no particularly good reason, but which you will quite possibly still want tomorrow.
Nov 30	comment	Proper/official pronunciation of “conch” From Ngrams, the American pronunciation is roughly 50/50 split between /kɑntʃ/ and /kɑŋk/, while the British pronunciation is usually /kɒn(t)ʃ/ (you can tell from whether the plural is conches or conchs).
Nov 30	comment	How to distinguish the pronunciation of “year” and “ear”? If a word ends with the vowel of bay, buy, bee, or boy, many dialects sort of add the consonant 'y' to the beginning of the next word if it starts with a vowel sound. Similarly, the vowels of mow, now, moo, and new add the consonant 'w'; and in many non-rhotic dialects, the vowels that end law, spa, and Africa add the consonant 'r'. More generally, the sound at the end of one word often alters the sound at the beginning of the next, so how similar year and ear sound may depend on the preceding word.
Nov 29	comment	To retroactively create? However, once time travel is invented, time travelers will have flooded the past, and the word you want will have retroactively been part of the language all along.
Nov 29	comment	How to distinguish the pronunciation of “year” and “ear”? It depends on the word before them: "three years" and "three ears" sound very similar, if not identical, but "two ears" and "two years" are quite different. Similarly, "two oars" and "two wars" are very similar or identical, but "three oars" and "three wars" are different.
Nov 29	comment	Why do I instinctively want to use the present tense with a conditional? The fact remains that most native English speakers would not use the future in the sentence. We have around 10 answers to this question, all of which give different reasons why the future tense is incorrect (and I have to admit that I can't be sure my reason is the right one), but yours is the only one that actually says that the future tense is correct. It isn't, which is why I voted you down.
Nov 28	comment	Origin of “In which …” "In which ..." and "Wherein ..." are used in translations of Don Quixote, which was first published in 1605.
Nov 27	revised	Origin of “In which …” added 8 characters in body
Nov 27	answered	Origin of “In which …”
Nov 27	revised	Why do I instinctively want to use the present tense with a conditional? gave lots more examples in support of my theory
Nov 26	comment	Anglicization of diacritical marks and non-English letters Switzerland has never used ß (or at least not in the last century) and still doesn't, so street in Switzerland is Strasse and not Straße. So this replacement isn't just used for transliterating from German into English; it's used for transliterating from German into German. The traditional replacements for ä and ö in German are ae and oe. Aside from German and the Scandinavian languages, I don't know of any other traditional character replacements for transliteration into English.
Nov 26	comment	Did I “get” (or “take”) my degree “from” (or “in”) the University of Somewhere? Whether you "got your degree from UoS" or "took your degree at UoS" depends on whether Somewhere is in North America or on the British Isles.
Nov 26	comment	Common expression for “frame conditions” for a working concept/process I googled Rahmenbedingungen, and looked at some of the uses. There's not just one translation that works for all uses of the word. But necessary business conditions, necessary economic conditions, favorable business conditions, or favorable economic conditions seem to work for a reasonable fraction of the uses, and I expect a phrase like this is what you're looking for.
Nov 26	comment	Common expression for “frame conditions” for a working concept/process @Hauser: I think necessary conditions is the right phrase. Consider this Ngram. Preconditions is also used, but it's not the term you want, since you say it's not just pre-. And you are wrong about a condition being always necessary or sufficient; this may be true for the mathematical use of the word condition, but you also have social conditions, working conditions, economic conditions, emergency conditions, etc.